Fake news site fabricates story of 47 dying newspapers in Alabama

A story titled “The Ghost Paper That Ate Alabama” spread quickly on social media, claiming a right-wing media company had bought and shut down 47 weekly newspapers, replacing journalists with AI-generated content. Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Journalism Lab that the story, published by a site called The Editorial, was entirely invented. Benton found that …

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Why Google (and other companies) could pay dearly for their AI’s mistakes

A German court has ruled that Google is legally responsible for the content of its AI-generated search summaries. Bruce Schneier writes for Schneier on Security that the court rejected Google’s argument that users should verify AI output themselves, ruling instead that the summaries are “an expression of Google’s business activities.” The decision reignites a long-running …

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Robin Williams already answered the AI slop problem, in 1997

A film scene from 1997 offers an unexpected framework for the current debate about AI-generated content. Jay Acunzo writes for jayacunzo.com that Robin Williams’ famous bench monologue in Good Will Hunting captures exactly what separates human creative work from AI output. In the scene, Williams’ character Sean confronts Will, a young genius who can recite …

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Tidal bans royalties for AI-generated music

Tidal has announced a new AI policy that blocks fully AI-generated music from earning royalties and flags it with a visible label in the app. Tony Gervino writes for Tidal Magazine that the move is driven by an inbox “inundated with music that is created completely AI-generated and impersonating existing artists purely for financial gain.” …

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Your newsletter, your rules: Beehiiv now lets writers block AI crawlers with a single click

Newsletter platform beehiiv has integrated Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control tool directly into its dashboard, giving writers a straightforward way to decide whether AI crawlers can access their content. Duncan Riley reports for SiliconANGLE that the feature is rolling out to beehiiv’s roughly 135,000 publishers starting today. Until now, blocking AI bots meant editing robots.txt files …

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AI written books are flooding Amazon with near-identical covers

A collage of roughly 220 Amazon book covers reveals a hidden pattern in the flood of AI generated nonfiction. The covers, all discovered by searching for “100,000 whys”, look deceptively normal. Yet their eerie similarity exposes the telltale footprint of large language models. Security researcher and writer Michał Zalewski presents the collage on his blog …

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Fan tribute vs plagiarism: How an AI-driven book website tricks search engines, chatbots, and even loyal fans

A San Francisco marketing agency copied the entire contents of a bestselling book, replaced its original artwork with AI-generated images, and launched a website that now outranks the official page in search results. Andy Baio writes on Waxy.org that the agency, Qontour, built the unauthorized platform for John Koenig’s “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” without …

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Botsitting: Workers spend nearly a full day each week managing AI tools, study finds

White-collar workers spend an average of 6.4 hours per week managing AI tools rather than benefiting from them. Thibault Spirlet reports for Business Insider on a new study from Glean’s Work AI Institute, conducted with researchers from Notre Dame, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, which surveyed 6,000 full-time workers in the United States, the United Kingdom, …

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